Modeling Nutrient and Disease Dynamics in a Plant-Pathogen System Using Ordinary and Delay Differential Equations.

摘要: In terrestrial plant systems, nutrient inputs can alter plant diversity and yield as well as disease severity and prevalence. In this talk, we discuss model formulations, results and implications of two differential equation models that are applied to a plant-pathogen system. Interestingly, we show that the cell-to-cell delay differential equation model exhibits a threshold, R, where if the virus reproduction number, R0, is greater than R, then the infection is too aggressive and forces the extinction equilibrium to be globally asymptotically stable. In addition, the explicit nutrient model has a virus reproduction number that incorporates environmental and physiological attributes. Results suggest that considering nutrient-mediated virus dynamics can give rise to robust models that may prove useful in untangling how nutrients and spatial structure influence pathogen growth dynamics.